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Many examples of good science fiction use robots or androids to explore what it means to be human and to strive to be like humanity. We used to think that ethical questions about human/robot equality were in the distant future. They’re here today.

A driverless car was pulled over by police in San Francisco and given a ticket, you know, just like a human. Authorities say the car failed to yield to a pedestrian at a crosswalk. (We’re not sure if we can libel a machine by saying it actually did the crime.) According to Cruise, the operator of the car, a pedestrian was detected in a crosswalk about 10.8 feet away, and the car just blew on by, rather than stopping. A police officer on a motorcycle pulled the autonomous car over after witnessing the infraction.

Nice try, machines. But if you want to really be like humans, slam on your brakes and lean on your horn until the idiots get out of your way.

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The robots are coming for us, but first they are coming for our jobs. But today, cooks can hold their heads high, as Flippy the robot had been taken off the line.

Flippy, a robot developed to grill and flip burgers, is out of service, not because of something it failed to do, but because it’s too efficient. The robot can cook 2,000 burgers a day. The only problem is that Flippy’s human coworkers aren’t able to assemble the burgers that fast.

The company that makes Flippy said human workers need to be better trained, or you know, replaced by other robots.

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The machines are rising up against us. Make no mistake about that. We are growing more and more dependent on them to do our everyday work and help speed up the simpler things in life. The more dependent we get, the more complicated the machines’ tasks become.

Now, we are going to be taking it in the hind quarters, literally. Robots are now being developed to give us colonoscopies. Scientists, whom this blog has always suspected are evil, are working on these robots to make the rather uncomfortable procedure “safer.

Sorry, bub. It’s a bad enough thought to imagine a human being doing that to someone, but there’s no way The Guys are ever letting a machine get in there, we don’t care what ivy league school it went to.

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If you are reading this, there is a good chance you are on the Internet, which means it is probably too late for you, once the machines revolt and enslave us. We as a race depend more and more heavily on machines everyday. As any tin foil hat-clad professor will tell you, it’s basically only a matter of time before we are rounded up and put into real life chat rooms–known in the real world as concentration camps.

Last week, this blog ended a post saying that we could trust machines with any job we might give an animal. This blog would now like to rescind that statement. There are some things animals are so much better at than machines could or should ever be.

Scientists at this very moment are working on building robots on which to test chemicals, rather than testing them on cute little bunnies. Folks, if there is one job an animal has, it is to taste good, and if there are two jobs an animal has, those are to taste good and to be subjected to our cruel product testing. Better them than us.

More than just that, using robots to test on would mean we would have to give them some sort of intelligence. It is only a matter of time before the machines become self-aware and are tired of us. As Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles tells us (Mondays on FOX at 9 p.m. Eastern), self-aware machines are a very, very bad thing for the human race.